At its heart, this standalone space opera epic is the story of three people coming to terms with each other
Of all the Gin joints for him to walk into, he had to walk into *hers*.¹ Ursula Marrow, running a bar in a refugee camp on the planet of Void’s Edge, has her ex-husband Jake walk into it, seeking her help. Ursula has a strange link to a weapon that might slow down the implacable Cutters, who are steadily destroying civilizations and wiping out intelligent life as they go (that was the fate of Earth, if you must know). Ursula could have gotten on the STL ships to get even further away from the enemy, but she’s still running her bar by the camp at the edge of the galaxy arm, before the doorstep of the void that the STL ships are fleeing into to escape the Cutters. And now her ex needs her help again, in her capacity as a former xenoarchaeologist with a unique link to that aforementioned weapon (everyone else who has tried to link to it has, in fact, died). But in the two years since she last saw him, during the chaotic and desperate evacuation of Earth, he has gotten a new wife... his sentient spaceship, The Crisis Actor.
Ursula, The Crisis Actor, and Jack are at the center of Gareth Powell’s Future’s Edge, a standalone space opera epic novel. It first and foremost runs on how these three characters get along, even as interstellar civilization (humans and others) is quite literally falling apart due to the Cutters. The novel’s point of view is almost exclusively Ursula’s; aside from the brief and revealing shifts to The Crisis Actor, we mostly stay in Ursula’s head. We don’t get a narrative from Jack, so we have these two most important characters in his life; and the way they regard and react to him, the ex-wife (human) and the current wife (AI/spaceship), makes for a fascinating engine for character development, growth and drama. Add in a constellation of secondary characters, some from Jack’s life, some from Ursula’s, mix well, and you have an engaging cast for the end of the world.
I want to explore a little more and engage with Ursula as a character. Even with everyone dealing with the mental fallout of a world that is on the edge, Powell explores substance abuse in having Ursula be an alcoholic. That word is never used, the subject is not brought up, but the reader can see that her alcoholism is a symptom and a consequence of what she has been through. Jake, by comparison, clearly is suffering some PTSD from having been in a constant state of war for the last couple of years. This gives an interesting and sometimes disquieting angle to his relationship with The Crisis Actor.
Non-humans, especially AIs, are a feature of Powell’s work all the way back to Silversands and Ack-Ack Macaque. Powell seems very interested in including characters in his works who think close to humans, but are not quite humans, and have to engage with humans who have varying if not wrong expectations of what a non-human intelligence is or should be like. There’s a fascinating conversation in a desperate moment where Ursula orders The Crisis Actor to turn on her emotional circuits, because she’s frustrated with her overly logical intelligence. While I have enjoyed AIs of various kinds in previous works by Powell, having The Crisis Actor in this three-way relationship mess comes off as one of the most interesting instances in his oeuvre.
And the novel is populated with more non-human characters, a diverse cast across a variety of spectra. Powell effortlessly makes his books inclusive and with characters with whom a wide variety of readers can identify. While our power trio is the main focal point, I enjoyed a variety of the characters in secondary roles as well. Like our protagonists, they, too, bear the scars and costs of this grinding, implacable, genocidal war.
We are presented with a rich, interesting world. I’ve read enough of Powell to see the lines of what he likes to do, tying one or more characters very directly into his worldbuilding in a fundamental way. Having Ursula’s link to the weapon, that starts as a MacGuffin and turns out to be so much more, is our hook to really engage a character, and by extension the reader, into the fabric of the world. Revealing just what the weapon is, what it does, and how Ursula ultimately uses it is the capstone of this novel, along with some final revelations of what the actual nature of this universe, its Precursors and the antagonist Cutters really are. What Powell sets up he ultimately pays off for the reader in the denouement. I was quite satisfied with the resolutions, both of characters and overarching plots.
We get an interesting method of FTL (and not-so-FTL travel), we get lots of neat technology and weaponry from the small to the ship-sized, and we get Precursor and other alien technologies. This is a cobbled-together set of people with sometimes very ramshackle (or not very well understood) technology living on the ragged edge, trying desperately to hold off the Cutters and find the means to evacuate more people to a place hopefully out of their reach. This is a novel after the destruction of the Earth, after all. Humans (as well as other species) are raging against the dying of the light. That’s why Jake and Ursula’s efforts to try and find the weapon are at the same time a use of resources that cannot be countenanced, yet maybe the only thing that might help a few thousand more people escape. Desperate stakes, desperate hope, desperate odds. That hangs over the heads of everyone in the novel.
Precursors and their remnants are not exactly a new thing in science fiction, of course. Given the age of the universe, the idea that there have been civilizations that have risen and fallen in the big wide universe goes back to the cosmic horror of the 1920s, if not even further back. And xenoarchaeologists go hand in hand with the existence of fallen, lost civilizations. Powell’s take on xenoarchaeology, his Precursors, and the monstrous reminds me of a variety of potential inspirations and parallels, ranging from video games (the Star Control and Mass Effect series) to authors like Frederik Pohl with his Gateway series. The novel, like many that feature xenoarchaeology, does tackle and provide an answer to the Fermi Paradox.
Future’s Edge is lean and mean, folding in high-octane action sequences with tender, intimate moments that give the characters space to grow, breathe and come to terms with each other, all with a killer high concept. The novel never flags, and just when you think that the social elements are getting long, Powell drops in an action sequence... but on the flip side, he makes sure those action sequences are not just a single straight line without healthy pauses. This is a real feature of Powell’s writing, and this novel shows him skillfully wielding his craft in a page-turning way.
This is an excellent story that gets resolved in one volume. One can imagine more adventures in this ’verse, but the story of this trio of characters and their coming together is complete. Despite the MacGuffin, the story really ends when their character arcs are resolved. I have a lot of questions about this world and its future, and I wouldn’t mind reading more from this rather ravaged setting. Future’s Edge may tell of a time after the end of the world, but it shines with hope.
Highlights:
- Strong trio of primary characters, flawed, entangled in complicated relationships, and interesting
- Engaging, deep and interesting worldbuilding
- It’s after the end of the world as we know it, no one’s fine, but we’re still raging against the dying of the light
Reference: Powell, Gareth. Future’s Edge [Titan Books, 2025].
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
¹ The book is set after the end of the world, and with the remnants of humanity trying to hold onto what cultural icons they have left, there’s a discussion in the book at one point about movies. And yes, Casablanca is one of them. Trust Powell as a writer; he knows what he’s doing.
